According to the Global Network, from the morning of January 14, 2022, the Hunga Tonga volcano in the Pacific island nation of Tonga began to erupt, and on the 15th, the most violent eruption occurred, and locals said that the scene was like the end of the world. The eruption triggered a tsunami in Tonga, where communications have been completely cut off and heavy losses are estimated.
Several satellites have actually photographed the volcanic eruption of the Tonga seafloor from space, and from the satellite, it can be sensed that this is an Earth-scale eruption, and the huge cloud soars into the sky to the stratosphere, reaching a height of 20,000 to 30,000 meters. On January 15, the submarine volcano of Aha Apai Island in the South Pacific island nation of Tongahun erupted again. Large amounts of volcanic ash, gas and water vapor gather to form huge clouds that soar into the sky.
After the eruption of the volcano, a tsunami was triggered, and a tsunami warning was issued throughout Tonga. A 1.2-metre-high tsunami swept towards the Gulf of Tonga's capital. Local people fled by car to higher ground. Due to the current complete interruption of national communications in Tonga, no casualties have been reported, but it is expected that the casualties will be very heavy.
Some experts estimate that the level of this volcanic eruption in Tonga may reach VEI-6, and the largest volcanic eruptions in more than a hundred years since the 20th century belong to VEI-6, such as Santa Maria in Guatemala, which erupted in 1902, Novalupta Volcano in Alaska, USA, which erupted in 1912, and Pinatubo Volcano in Luzon, Philippines, which erupted in 1991. The eruption in Tonga was the first ERUPTION of vei-6 since the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines on June 15, 1991.
31 years ago, when The eruption of Mount Pinatobo was 40 kilometers high, the peaks of the volcano were collapsed by 300 meters, and about 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide were ejected into the stratosphere during the eruption, and these substances and volcanic ash reduced the sun exposure on the earth by 10%, resulting in the next two years of the earth entering a "volcanic winter".
The eruption of the Aha Apai Island volcano in Tongahun will not only bring tsunami disasters to the world, but also affect the global temperature reduction, and even affect the territorial area of Tonga, and new islands may appear. The most famous volcanic eruption in history caused the "Summerless Year" was the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815, which was of VEI-7 magnitude. The energy may reach 800 million tons of TNT, releasing 53,000 times the power of the atomic bomb that the United States dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, at the end of World War II. Global temperatures dropped by an average of 0.53 degrees, resulting in no summer in 1816.
From the tsunami caused by the volcanic eruption on the tonga seabed, it can be a very vivid demonstration of how powerful the legendary undersea nuclear explosion is. Many people see the tsunami caused by the eruption of Tangjia Volcano and think that if this explosion is a hydrogen bomb, it must be the end of the earth.
The intensity of the tsunami triggered by this volcanic eruption was the formation of a 1.2-meter-high wall of water on the Tangjia Seashore, invading hundreds of meters to several kilometers inland. The intensity of this submarine volcanic eruption reached vei5-6 level, which belongs to the super volcanic eruption, some people call it "the largest volcanic eruption of this century", the energy of its eruption is about equivalent to 540 million tons of TNT, the TNT equivalent of the Hiroshima "Little Boy" atomic bomb in 1945 is 15,000 tons, then the energy of the Tonga submarine volcanic eruption is about 36,000 Hiroshima atomic bomb equivalent, so large destructive force, many people are curious about Tonga will not be destroyed!
Tonga belongs to a small island nation, so although the volcanic eruption is very destructive, it has little impact on the other islands of Tonga, but there is a tsunami situation.
In this way, the tens of meters high tsunami caused by the previous legendary underwater nuclear bomb explosion was frightening, and at present, the five permanents are no longer equipped with large-yield nuclear bombs, and the more powerful nuclear warheads are more than one million tons of equivalent, and the Soviet Union's 50 million tons of AN602 "Tsar Bomb" Big Ivan nuclear bomb is no longer pursued by countries because it has no operational significance.
The famous Indonesian tsunami of 2004, which triggered waves more than 10 meters high, was caused by a magnitude 9.3 earthquake on the seabed, and its release energy was about 200 million tons of TNT, which is about the explosive yield of four Large Ivan bombs.
Therefore, the kind of future nuclear war depicted in science fiction, the scene of a huge tsunami hundreds of meters high caused by an underwater nuclear explosion engulfing Europe or the United States, is almost impossible.
Nuclear weapons are actually not so exaggerated, at present, if a full-scale nuclear war breaks out on the earth, the nuclear bombs that can effectively explode on the ground will be about a thousand, and the rest will either have no time to launch, or be intercepted, or destroyed. So this nuclear bomb is nothing to the huge earth, but some countries may be destroyed, but human beings are fine, they will not be destroyed.
It is impossible to blow the earth to pieces with nuclear weapons. Compared with the 40,076-kilometer-long Earth, all of human nuclear weapons are projected at the same time without causing devastating effects. The reason is simple, these nuclear weapons are too destructive and energetic. For example, 66 million years ago, a meteorite crashed into the earth, this meteorite is 10 kilometers in diameter, the volume is more than the entire Mount Everest, the meteorite crashed into the Gulf of Mexico, the impact of the earth caused by the crater diameter of 110 kilometers, this impact did not shatter the earth, only led to the demise of the dinosaurs.
The impact released about 20 trillion tons of TNT equivalent, equivalent to 1 billion times the atomic bomb used by the United States in 1945 to bomb Hiroshima, Japan. During the Cold War, the total number of nuclear warheads in the United States and the Soviet Union was about 20,000, and the average nuclear warhead yield of 250,000 tons was less than 5 billion tons of TNT in the world, which was only 2.5 parts per 10,000 of the capacity released by the 10-kilometer-diameter asteroid meteorite in the Gulf of Mexico that exterminated dinosaurs. Therefore, throwing all the world's nuclear weapons together is equivalent to tickling the earth.
However, large-scale volcanic eruptions have a greater impact on the global environment, especially on plant growth and agricultural production, and at the same time have a great impact on animals, and low temperatures are also not conducive to the growth of many animals. The eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 caused the Earth's temperature to drop by 0.5 °C in the following two years, and such a large-scale volcanic eruption is a rare natural disaster, and there is currently nothing humans can do about such a disaster.